Oh, the Shenanigans
by Bundibird
Summary: In which our boys play pranks, flee from Uther, and cause all the madness and mayhem that only best friends can get away with. A series of oneshots. Open to requests! Chapter 4: In which Merlin is the voice, and he doesn't quite understand.
1. Chapter 1

_**AN: **_**A bit of fun for a Saturday evening. I have two more of these written already, the next of which I shall post on Monday, and after that I'm open to requests and suggestions. Enjoy!**

_**Chapter summary**_**: Gwen really doesn't understand Arthur and Merlin sometimes. **

**.**

**Oh, The Shenanigans**

**.**

Except for the fact that Prince Arthur does not _giggle,_ that's exactly the word that Gwen would have used to describe the sounds issuing from underneath the table in the hallway.

The muffled laughter turned into two gasps of discovery as Gwen lifted the edge of the table cloth and peered under it. Both Arthur and Merlin looked incredibly relieved to see her.

"Oh – thank goodness it's you Gwen!" Merlin exclaimed, grinning at her. "I thought we were gonners!"

She stared at the two of them – squashed together under the table like a pair of boys hiding from their tutor, with close to identical grins that screamed mischief – in bemusement.

"What are you doing?" she asked, her amused confusion clear in her voice.

"Hiding," Arthur informed her with a grin.

"...From _who_?" she asked, thoroughly befuddled by their behaviour.

At that moment, Uther's thunderous roar of "ARTHUR!" echoed through the hallway, and both the Prince and the servant gasped dramatically and lunged forwards to yank the tablecloth back down into place, sending Gwen staggering backwards a little in surprise.

She'd just steadied herself when Uther came storming around the corner looking utterly livid, his face the same shade of Pendragon red as his cloak, and... his whole body dripping wet?

He spotted Gwen standing in the hallway and thundered towards her, ignoring her frightened squeak and hurried backwards step.

"You! Maid! _Have you seen my son_?"

"U-uh... um – I... well, I – " Gwen stammered, trying to work out a way to not give away where Arthur (and Merlin) were hiding while at the same time not lie to her King.

Fortunately, Uther was apparently too furious to be able to deal with stuttering maids, and he took a step towards her and pointed intimidatingly at her.

"If you see him," he fumed, looking decidedly dangerous, "you tell him that the King is looking for him."

She nodded jerkily and he stared hard at her for another long moment before spinning away and storming off down the hall, his cloak swishing damply behind him and his boots leaving sodden footprints on the floor in his wake.

A second or two after he'd disappeared around the far corner, there was an explosion of laughter from underneath the table and Arthur and Merlin crawled out, looking very much like they might split apart at the seams from the force of their laughter.

"Great work Guinevere," Arthur said, using Merlin to pull himself up into a standing position and managing to temporarily control his hysterics. "We owe you one."

He reached down and hauled the still-laughing Merlin to his feet and began shepherding him down the hall in the other direction from Uther. "Come on Merlin – we'll make a break for it before he comes back this way."

Grinning broadly, the two of them set off at a jog, waving to a still very bemused Gwen over their shoulders as they went.

"Arthur!" she called as they rounded the corner, remembering something.

He drew to a halt, looking back at her questioningly.

"Uh... your father is looking for you..." she said.

Arthur laughed again.

"I'll let him know you passed on the message!" he grinned, then disappeared around the corner after Merlin.

Gwen stared after them for a long moment after they'd disappeared, jaw slightly slack in befuddlement, before she picked up her basket and went on her way.

**.**

**Prince Arthur doesn't giggle when he's pranking his father the same way Dean Winchester doesn't snuggle when he's sick. **

**Please review! Next installment on Monday. First in is first done for requests!**

**Bundi**


	2. Chapter 2

_**Chapter Summary: **_**In which there is punishment. **

_**.**_

_**Oh, The Shenanigans **_

_**.**_

"You know I blame you for this," Arthur groused, plunging his hand into the bucket by his side.

"Me?" Merlin yelped, outraged. "If anyone should be blamed, it's you! It was your idea!"

"Exactly! And you didn't stop me! Therefore, this is your fault."

Merlin gaped at him for a second.

"As if you would have stopped even if I'd tried! Wait – no – I take that back. I _did_ try. You _didn't _stop. Case in point."

"You could have tried harder," Arthur retorted, throwing a glare over his shoulder at the servant. "Besides. I never thought _I'd_ get punished too. This is... this is barbaric, this is. I'm the future king! I shouldn't be treated like this. I mean – I knew he'd punish _you_, but – "

"Gee, thanks," Merlin said dryly, cutting him off and narrowing his eyes at the Prince. "I feel so warm and fuzzy now, thank you."

Arthur opened his mouth to reply – no doubt with some kind of snarky response – but at that moment something banged on the wall from the other side, making them both jump violently.

"Less talking, more scrubbing!" Uther hollered at them from outside, his voice reverberating around the metal cylinder and making their ears ring. "If you have enough energy to plot whilst you're cleaning, then I can think of another three grain silos to match this one that haven't been cleaned in a while!"

Both boys cringed dramatically and went back to their scrubbing. All was silent for a few minutes until Arthur chuckled under his breath.

"It was pretty funny though," he said in response to Merlin's questioning look, keeping his voice low so as to avoid his father's detection.

The servant's face split into a grin as he realised what Arthur was talking about.

"I wish I could have seen his face," Merlin whispered, laughing silently. "Emma – the kitchen maid – told me she was just passing his rooms when he came bursting out, the bucket still on his head."

Arthur snorted loudly, then brought his fist up to his mouth in an attempt to stifle his renewed laughter.

"Morgana said that in the two hours he spent looking for us he left wet trails all over the castle. She could tell exactly where he'd been because of all the sodden prints he left behind!"

Merlin made a strange sound in the back of his throat as he tried to contain his laughter.

"How long do you think it will be before he stops checking above his head every time he opens a door?"he asked, grinning.

"A long time," Arthur chortled. "Which," he went on, dropping his voice further, "is what inspired my next plan."

When Uther – standing guard outside the grain silo to ensure that his son and his son's manservant did a proper job of learning their lesson – heard Merlin's deep-throated groan of protest, he mistakenly thought it was a groan of exhaustion due to all the extra scrubbing he was being forced to do, and the King smiled grimly to himself at the thought of his lesson sinking in.

**.**

**The next chapter will be up Thursday evening and includes: mud, adrenaline-high servants, mud, and debatably sourced goals. And mud. **

**Thanks to everyone who reviewed! Feel free to sling a request in my direction if you have one. **

**Bundi**


	3. Chapter 3

_**AN: **_**Thank you everyone for all your reviews – I'm sorry I haven't yet replied; this is the first chance I've had since Monday to get online! I will reply to everyone, probably this weekend. :) **

_**Chapter Three**_**: In which Merlin is a place-filler and Arthur (thinks he) is the hero of the match. **

**.**

**Oh, The Shenanigans**

**.**

"So... what's the point of the game?" Merlin asked, more than a little hesitantly.

Arthur huffed at having to repeat himself. Again.

"The point, _Mer_lin, is to get this, " –he held up a roughly hewn leather ball which had been stuffed with scraps of wool– "through those posts at the end, while the other team," –he gestured to the various knights scattered about– "try to stop you getting it through your posts and try to get it through theirs."

Merlin looked around at the knights, some of whom were wearing white shirts and some wearing red.

"And I have to play because...?" the warlock near-whined.

"Because otherwise the teams are uneven."

Merlin scowled, then looked down at the oversized white shirt he was wearing before gesturing vaguely to Arthur's red one.

"And I'm not on your team because...?"

Arthur grinned.

"Because I want to win," he said cheerfully.

.

Twenty minutes later, all Merlin had to show for his efforts at the blasted game were seriously muddied clothes and a whole lot of sore spots that – by tomorrow – would be rather bright purple bruises.

He'd spent the first ten minutes of the game just trying to stay out of the knights' way. They were taking the whole thing way too seriously, and Merlin hardly fancied putting himself between them and the ball.

But then Arthur had spotted him and called him on his lacklustre participation, threatening, "If you don't join in – _properly_ – then I'll have you clean my entire chambers with nothing but one of your own socks."

Now, Merlin quite liked his socks, and he didn't wish to ruin them by using one to clean the Prince's far-messier-than-a-Prince-should-be-able-get-it-in-just-a-single-morning chambers.

So, against all his instincts and senses of self-preservation, Merlin threw him into the fray.

And he hadn't even gotten _close_ to the ball. How's that for disheartening.

So now, Merlin was standing a little back from the main crowd, trying to catch his breath after a particularly brutal encounter with the mass of knights, when someone kicked the ball wide and it flew into an open, unguarded patch of muddied grass.

Seeing his chance (and remembering the threat to his socks), Merlin made a break for it.

Just as Merlin started running, Arthur shoved his way free of the mêlée and launched himself off in pursuit of the ball as well, so that he and Merlin were running parallel to each other like two edges of a triangle with the ball at the point.

They reached it at nearly the same time and – with perhaps a little more enthusiasm than the situation called for – Merlin threw himself forwards.

Exactly _how _it happened, Merlin wasn't quite sure, but somehow he ended up sprawled on his back in the mud, the ball sitting quite cheerfully on his stomach and his legs tangled with Arthur's (who had somehow ended up flat on his back in the mud as well).

The Prince pulled himself into a half-raised position with a squelch of mud and stared at Merlin with a slightly stunned expression.

"You tripped me!" he accused, shocked.

"No I didn't," Merlin denied. "You just didn't see my leg there."

Arthur narrowed his eyes in a manner that Merlin had long ago learnt to associate with danger.

"Give me the ball, Merlin," the Prince said, his tone broking no argument as he held one mud-coated hand out for the item in question.

Merlin looked down at the innocent looking ball sitting on his stomach that had caused all this drama.

Whether it was the adrenaline still coursing through his veins from his wild dive that made him do it, or the fact that he hadn't actually had a proper go yet, or perhaps sheer stupidity, Merlin didn't know.

"No," he said impishly, and then he scooped up the ball and started running.

It was sheer stupidity, he decided quickly.

It took less than half a second after his departure for Arthur to roar his hunting-roar before he leapt to his feet and launched himself after Merlin, who was now running – ball tucked under one arm – for his life, the Prince of Camelot and an entire contingent of knights on his tail.

And there was definitely something wrong with him, he decided. Because, despite having a bunch of men at least twice his size and with cheerful dispositions similar to that of a pack of rabid wolves chasing after him... this was _fun_.

They'd been at the wrong end of the field (Merlin's team had been losing quite spectacularly), so it was a stellar effort on Merlin's part that he managed to stay ahead of the pack for long enough that he (and the ball) made it to his team's end.

Launching himself over the line, Merlin slammed the ball to the ground and raised his arms above his head in victory.

"GOAL!" he hollered at the top of his lungs, grinning wildly.

And then Arthur slammed into him.

.

"I still don't know how you managed to injure _both_ of us," Merlin grumbled as the two of them limped their way down the hallway.

"It's because you're so bloody _bony,"_ Arthur groused in response, cringing as he put too much weight on his leg.

It had looked spectacular, apparently.

Arthur had grabbed Merlin around the waist in some kind of over-exuberant full-body tackle, sending them both into a wild, spinning tumble.

They'd both gone crashing to the ground in a very dramatic fashion and – thanks in kind to Arthur's application of brute strength, Merlin's near weightlessness, and the fact that the ground was made up more of mud puddles than actual solid ground – they'd skidded a considerable distance before finally coming to a stop, winded, wheezing, and tangled (again).

And now they were dripping mud all over the place as they limped painfully along, looking more like half-dead shipwreck survivors than a pair of perfectly respectable humans.

So it was kind of bad timing for them that Morgana chose _that_ moment to walk down _that_ particular hallway to get to wherever she was going.

"What on earth happened to you two?" she asked in shock, drawing to a halt in surprise.

By way of response, both boys scowled and pointed balefully at the other.

Morgana stared at them for a long moment, her eyes flicking from one to the other of their mud-caked faces before finally shaking her head a little.

"You know... I don't think I want to know," she said, and swept gracefully away, stepping daintily over the mud patches all the way down the hall.

Both boys watched her go, and then Merlin groaned dramatically.

"The cleaners are going to _hate_ us..." he said.

.

**I've not got the next chapter prewritten, so I can't say when I'll next update. Any requests are welcome!**

**Bundi**


	4. Chapter 4

_Chapter Summary: In which Merlin is the voice, and he doesn't quite understand._

_For Pawthorn, who requested this. A tough call, but it was fun to do! Not to mention that it gave me an excuse to watch the video over and over again – for research purposes, of course. I'm not sure if it's exactly what you were imagining when you requested it, but I hope you enjoy!_

_Borderline crack, this one. (You know – cause the others have been so serious…)_

...

Chapter Four

...

Arthur was walking down a hallway, minding his own business, when Merlin suddenly stumbled out of an alcove and into the Prince's path.

"Merlin!" he yelped, completely startled. "Where the hell have you been? Gaius has been worried sick! Gwaine nearly tore the castle to pieces looking for you!"

Not to mention his own frantic worry and frenzied searching, but he said nothing of that.

Merlin staggered a little, looking lost and bewildered, and Arthur took a concerned step forwards.

"The... the future..." the warlock said haltingly, and then passed out.

...

"It was... bizarre," Merlin said a good while later, wrapped in Arthur's warmest blanket in front of the Prince's raging fire, with Arthur protectively close on one side and Gwaine squished up next to him on the other, and Gwen, Gaius and the other knights scattered closely around as well.

"There was... television," he said, wide eyed, "and magazines, and radio. And cinemas and computers and fan-fiction and telephones and aeroplanes and commercial bakeries and we were famous and I met us and we tried to tell me something, but – "

"Wait – wait," Arthur said, holding up one hand as though to physically stall Merlin's increasingly frantic babble. "Slow down – I have no idea what you're talking about; you aren't making any sense. For a start, tele…whatsits and – all those things… what on earth are they? And what do you mean you met us?"

"I mean I met us!" Merlin cried, his eyes wide and earnest. "And we looked almost exactly the same as we do now, only I was taller and you were burlier, and Future-Me never went anywhere without a scarf, and Future-You had these things that you wore on your eyes called _sunglasses,_ and Excalibur was made of a substance called _plastic_ and we both wore really strange clothing when we weren't what we called _on set_, and –"

"Merlin," Arthur interrupted again, growing steadily more concerned for his friend's mental health. "Stop – you're making no sense at all. Let's… let's start at the start. You say you were in the future? How many years into the future?"

"Hundreds!" Merlin half yelled, his eyes huge. "Hundreds and hundreds!"

Arthur looked mightily confused.

"Hundreds?" he asked, frowning a little. "How were we there if it was hundreds of years in the future? Surely we wouldn't still be… I mean – no man can live for hundreds of years, surely."

"I don't know – I wasn't paying much attention to that, frankly," Merlin said, waving his hands wildly in an _it-doesn't-matter_ gesture. "Arthur – you're missing the important part. We had a message for me, and I'm it meant something important and we need to work it out!"

"A message?" Arthur asked, his attention successfully captured. "What was it? What was the message?"

"It was from… Oh, what was his name? Future-You told me more than once. I think – John? John… Farmer! – that was it. John Farmer gave Future-Us a message that we had to pass on to me, and it must have been vitally important, because we kept saying it – over and over and over."

"Ok," Arthur said, clearly impatient to find out what the message was. "Get to it then – what does this Farmer person from the future want us to know?"

"That we're the voice," Merlin said seriously, with the weight of someone passing on a much protected secret. "And we have to understand it."

…

_Hands up if you have 'You're the Voice' on your iPod because of Colin and Bradley. It's kind of the same as having 'Eye of the Tiger' because of Jensen Ackles. Ah, I love those boys. _

_Pawthorn, I hope I did it justice! Like I said – probably not what you were expecting, but I couldn't think of a way to have Arthur and Merlin legitimately singing it, so I decided instead to have Colin and Bradley singing it and Merlin witnessing it (and being very confused). Hope you liked!_

_Bundi_


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